1917: the year of revolutions (1) February to October

Workers on the streets of Petrograd.

The third winter of the war coincided with unprecedentedly cold weather (-15 C) in Petrograd. Arctic frosts and blizzards brought the railways to a standstill. Factories closed and thousands of workers were laid off. Food was short.

On Thursday 23 February the temperature rose suddenly and people left their houses. This was International Women's Day, an important date in the socialist calendar and towards noon thousands of women, students and peasants, began to march towards the city centre to protest for equal rights. The march coincided with a strike of women textile workers who were protesting about bread shortages. They were quickly joined by their menfolk from the neighbouring metal works and as they marched towards the city centre they shouted ‘Bread’ and ‘Down with the Tsar’. By the afternoon some 100,000 workers had come out on strike and marched to the city centre.  

On 25 February a three-day general strike began. All the city’s factories ceased to operate, as some 200,000 workers joined the demonstrations, which now had a more political flavour. On Sunday 26 February, police and soldiers fired on marchers, shooting more than fifty people dead. 

In the early hours of 27 February the revolution began in earnest when the Petrograd garrison voted to disobey orders to fire on civilians. Soldiers and workers captured the Arsenal, occupied the telephone exchange and most of the railway stations, requisitioned cars and drove round the streets firing at police snipers and being fired on by them. 

The Peter and Paul Fortress, Petrograd

On 28 February the crowd stormed the Peter and Paul Fortress, ‘the Russian Bastille’ (though the prisons were empty). After some fighting, the red flag was finally raised.

The February Revolution was spontaneous and involved the great mass of the civilian population of Petrograd.  It was more violent than the subsequent October Revolution – nearly 1500 people were killed. Symbols of the old state power were destroyed, tsarist states smashed or beheaded, policemen hunted down and lynched.

But the revolutionary leaders were taken by surprise. They were in exile, in prison or abroad. Lenin was in Zurich, Trotsky in New York. Having spent their whole lives waiting for the revolution they failed to recognise it when it came. 

Russia in the First World War

Russian prisoners after Tannenberg,
August 1914
Public domain

On 1 August 1914 Germany declared war on Russia. Austria-Hungary declared war on the 6th. The immediate cause was Germany’s decision to support Austria-Hungary in her struggle with Russia in the Balkans. With the declarations of war, Russia experienced a wave of patriotic fervour. The Duma dissolved itself in a gesture of solidarity. St Petersburg lost its German name and was renamed Petrograd.

It is not true that Russia was unprepared for war. After the defeat by Japan, there had been considerable military expenditure, and by 1914 she was spending more than Germany on her armed forces. Her standing army of 1.4 million men was the largest in the world. Fully mobilised, she could field over 5 million soldiers. The trouble was that she was well prepared for a short war, but had no real contingency plans for a long war of attrition. Whereas the other European powers proved able to adapt, the tsarist system proved too unwieldy and inflexible. 

Russia fought a south-west war against the Austrians and a north-west war against the Germans. In mid-August the Russians broke through in Galicia, forcing the Austrians to retreat. This established the military reputation of General Alexei A. Brusilov, one of the most brilliant of the First World War commanders. 

General Alexei Brusilov
A brilliant commander with
an impossible task.
Public domain

On the north-western front, by contrast, the Russian advance ended in defeat at the hands of the Germans at Tannenberg in East Prussia on 31 August 1914. A second defeat at the Masurian Lakes in September compounded Russia's humiliation. A quarter of a million men were lost.

The army lacked a clear command structure. Military authority was divided between the War Ministry, Supreme Headquarters and the Front commands. Commanders were appointed for their loyalty to the court rather than their competence. The aristocratic generals wanted to fight a nineteenth-century cavalry war and scorned the art of building trenches. The trains were filled with horses and fodder.

Russia: the early twentieth century

Nicholas II 

Nicholas II (1894-1917)

Nicholas succeeded his father in November 1894. Later that month he married the German princess Alix of Hesse (Tsarina Alexandra Feodorovna). He and Alexandra were crowned at the Dormition Cathedral in Moscow on 14 May 1896. The coronation was marred by the deaths of more than a thousand people at the tragedy of the Khondynka Field. Nicholas was not responsible for the disaster, but his tin-eared response was a public-relations disaster.

His reign was a tragedly for himself and for Russia. In 1904 Alexandra at last gave birth to a male heir after four daughters - but the longed-for son was a haemophiliac. In her desperation, the tsarina turned to the holy man, Grigori Rasputin, and she came completely under his influence.

Opposition

The Russian government was confronted with an almost universally hostile intelligentsia (a Russian word), and the autocracy of Nicholas II was increasingly challenged by both revolutionaries and constitutionalists. In 1900 the peasant-based Socialist Revolutionary Party was founded. In the 1880s many opposition movements became dominated by the ideology of Marxism.

In 1898 nine delegates from workers’ associations and Marxist discussion groups met at Minsk and formed the first ‘Congress of the Russian Social Democratic and Labour Party’. Most of the participants were well known to the secret police, the Okhrana, and were shortly afterwards arrested and imprisoned.

One leader was rapidly emerging. Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov was born in Simbirsk in 1870, the son of an inspector of schools for the province. Both his parents came from noble families. In 1887 his elder brother Alexander Ulyanov, was executed for his involvement with an abortive plot to assassinate the Tsar. When he enrolled as a law student at the University of Kazan he was drawn into another clandestine group calling itself the People’s Will. At this stage Marxism was only one of a number of revolutionary ideologies.

Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (Lenin)
in 1916.
Public domain.

At university he read Das Kapital and he was expelled for his subversive views. But he then enrolled at St Petersburg university and qualified as a lawyer. In 1883 he arrived in St Petersburg. In the summer of 1895 he travelled to Switzerland, but returned to St Petersburg in the same year. In the winter he was arrested by the Okhrana for incitement to strikes. After a year in prison he was sentenced to three years in Siberia (1897-1900) where he married a fellow-revolutionary, Nadezhda Krupskaya.

Russia in the nineteenth century: Alexander II and Alexander III

Tsar Alexander II.
Public domain.

Alexander II (1855-81): the 'Tsar Liberator'

Alexander Nikolayevich succeeded his father during the Crimean war and the first year of his reign was taken up with military affairs. His foreign policy was, in many respects, a continuation of his father's - to suppress Polish nationalism and expand into the declining Ottoman Empire -  but after the fall of Sevastopol this ambition had to be put on hold.  He had to negotiate for peace, and the terms of the resulting treaty were unfavourable to Russia. The defeat impressed him with a profound conviction that the country needed to modernise and reform. 

Alexander's reign saw a dramatic expansion of Russia's railway network. Defeat in the Crimea exposed Russia’s lack of a railway network, with the only major line being the link between St Petersburg and Moscow (450 miles). In 1853 there were just 620 miles of railway, by 1866 there were 3,000 miles and by 1877 the mileage had trebled. The railways served a dual military and economic purpose. They enabled men and military hardware to be delivered to the field of conflict and they speeded up the transport of goods.

The emancipation of the serfs: In March 1856 he told the nobility of Moscow,

it is better to abolish serfdom from above than to wait until the serfs begin to liberate themselves from below.

However, the bulk of the landowning class was determined to give the freed peasants as little as possible. 

The emancipation settlement, proclaimed on 19 February (3 March NS) 1861, was therefore a compromise, but one particularly aimed at winning over the landlords. 

1. Peasants were granted their existing allotments and no longer owed labour duties or services. Legally, they were now free.
2. The government compensated the landlords by paying them eighty per cent of the capital value of the land they were surrendering to the peasants. The peasants then had to pay twenty per cent of the capital value of their allotments to the landlord and the rest to the state over a period of forty-nine years. 

This meant that emancipation was not, in practice, a good deal for the peasants. 

1. From 1863, they were bound to 'temporary obligation', which meant that they had to continue providing their old dues and services until they had redeemed the value of their allotments. This could take many years. 
2. On the other hand, if they wished to be free of these obligations, they could receive 'beggars' holdings', which were very small and often less than the land they had had for their own use when they were serfs. Only half a million peasants, or five per cent of the total peasant population, most of them from the fertile 'black earth' provinces of the south, accepted this offer, and many of those who did so were forced to return to the estates of the landowners in search of paid labour. 

Emancipation therefore fell short of the hopes of the idealists, leaving many peasants economically worse off than when they had been serfs. 

Grigory Myasoyedov,
 Peasants Reading the Emancipation Manifesto (1873)
Public domain.

Further reforms: Other measures followed the emancipation. Local assemblies (zemstva) were introduced in 1864. They were elected by the nobility, urban dwellers and peasants under a voting system based on property qualification. The zemstva were empowered to levy taxes and to spend their funds on schools, public health, roads, and other social services. This meant the creation of new posts that were filled by professional people. More than half were teachers, who presided over a remarkable expansion of primary education. The remainder were largely medical professionals and administrators. On the other hand, local government lacked the powers and finance it needed to do its job properly. 

Russia in the nineteenth century: Alexander I and Nicholas I

Alexander I of Russia,
by George Dawe
Public domain.

The extent of the country 

At the beginning of the nineteenth century Russia was geographically the world’s most extensive country and its empire was expanding: Finland in 1809, the Grand Duchy of Warsaw in 1815. In 1800 Georgia was annexed. In 1859 the rest of the Caucasus was conquered and the Chechen hero Imam Shamil captured. In 1860 the Amur and Maritime provinces were acquired from China, and Turkestan from Persia in 1875. Turkmenistan was annexed in 1881. The Pacific port of Vladivostok was founded in 1860. The only territory lost was Alaska, which was sold to the United States in 1867 for $8 million.

The economy 

This vast area was sparsely populated with only two major cities, St Petersburg and Moscow, but the population grew from 68 million in 1850 to 124 million in 1897 and nearly 170 million in 1914 (compare with just under 146 million in 2019). An estimated 45 per cent of the male population were serfs.

Agriculture remained primitive with the three-field system still the norm, though Russia was exporting grain to pay for the manufactures she needed. The Russian iron-smelting industry dated from the eighteenth century. The second major industry was cotton-spinning.

Autocracy and repression 

Russia was officially an autocracy headed by a tsar who ruled by divine right. There was no tradition of opposition or protest. 

Alexander I (1801-25)

Alexander came to the throne following his father's murder, and he could never rid himself of his guilt by association. His reign was beset by a contradiction he never resolved. He had imbibed his grandmother's Enlightenment principles, and carried on her educational reforms. He believed in liberty for all social classes, but he was never clear how this could work in a country with such a huge serf population. In order to carry out any reforms and over-ride vested interests, he needed to retain his autocratic powers. 

Alexander and Napoleon: His reign was dominated by the figure of Napoleon. The two men were similar in age and came to power at about the same time. Both combined the language of Enlightenment rationalism, while ruling autocratically. Alexander was to prove Napoleon’s nemesis. He saw the French emperor as both ‘the transcendent talent’ and ‘the infernal genius of his time’. 

Catherine II ('the Great')

Catherine, by J. B. Lampi, 1780s
Kunsthistorisches Museum
Public domain

The century of the empresses

Russia in the eighteenth century saw four reigning empresses. This was made possible because of a degree of Peter the Great in February 1722 which overturned the traditional laws of succession and decreed that the tsar would have absolute right to choose his successor. The crown thus became a piece of personal property that he could dispose of at will. 

Catherine I: In 1724 Peter signed a decree bequeathing the crown to his second wife, Catherine, a Lithuanian of very obscure origins, who was then crowned in the Dormition Cathedral in Moscow. But later in the year Peter learned of her affair with the court chamberlain. He was executed and Peter tore up the succession decree. He died in January 1725, without naming his successor. Catherine was then proclaimed empress. She died in 1727 and was succeeded by Peter’s grandson, Peter II, who died without naming a successor in 1730. 

Anna: The Supreme Privy Council offered the throne to Peter the Great’s niece, Anna Ivanovna, a childless widow, who became the first female sovereign to rule in fact as well as in name. She died in 1740.

Elizabeth: After a complicated transition period, in which the unfortunate  child tsar Ivan VI was overthrown and then imprisoned for life, Peter the Great’s daughter, Elizabeth seized power in November 1741. 

A year later she named as her heir her nephew, Peter the Great’s grandson, Duke Peter of Holstein. She brought him to Russia, made him convert from Lutheranism to Orthodoxy and began to search for a bride for him. Her choice fell on his second cousin, a German princess Sophie Auguste Fredericke, Princess of Anhalt-Zerbst. 

Grand Duke Peter,
later Tsar Peter III.

Catherine in Russia

Sophie was born in Stettin (now Szczecin, Poland) in Pomerania in 1729, the daughter of the reigning prince, Christian August of Anhalt-Zerbst, who was in the service of Frederick II ('the Great'). Her mother, Joanna, was the sister of the prince-bishop of Lübeck. The marriage to Peter was promoted by Frederick, who wished to cement his relationship with Russia and to prevent an alliance between Russia and Austria.

Sophie and her mother arrived in St Petersburg in February 1744. She learned Russian quickly and was received into the Orthodox Church in June 1744 where she was given her Russian name Ekaterina Alekseyevna in honour of the Empress Catherine I. On 21 August she and Peter were married. By this time Peter had already been ill twice – first with measles and then with smallpox.

 Grand Duchess Ekaterina Alekseyevna
around the time of her wedding,
 by George Christoph Grooth, 1745
Hermitage Museum.
Public domain.

The court at St Petersburg was presided over by Elizabeth and her lover, Alexei Razumovsky, whom diplomats privately called ‘the night emperor’. She then took a lover eighteen years her junior, Nikita Beketov, who founded Moscow University, a newspaper and the Academy of Arts. He gradually became the real power in Russia.

Peter the Great

Russia was Europe’s largest country, its significance recognized by Frederick the Great who said, ‘It will need the whole of Europe to keep these gentlemen within bounds’ (quoted Norman Davies, Europe. A History (Oxford, 1996), 649).

Russia: early history

Russia began as the Grand Duchy of Muscov but when the sixteen-year-old Ivan IV (the Terrible) was crowned in the Dormition Cathedral in Moscow, he was given the title of 'tsar' (Caesar). This was a sign that Moscow was the 'new Rome' and the tsars saw themselves as successors of the Roman Emperors.

By the late seventeenth century the Tsardom of Russia was centred on Moscow and the Volga, reaching down to the Caspian. The region of the middle Volga, comprising the old Muslim khanates of Astrakhan and Kazan, had been conquered by Ivan in the middle of the sixteenth century. In honour of the defeat of Kazan, Ivan built the Cathedral of the Intercession of the Holy Virgin on Red Square in Moscow. Popularly known as St Basil’s Cathedral, the building consisted of nine high chapels crowned with cupolas and joined to one another by arched passageways.

St Basil's Cathedral, Moscow

Expansion: east and west

After this Muscovy began its eastward expansion into Siberia in a quest for the fur of sables, foxes and ermines. In 1639 Russians reached the Pacific and from the 1640s they were exploring the Amur River.  Religious dissidents, fugitive convicts and settlers founded settlements in Siberia, and towns and cities were established in the eighteenth century. 

Russia also expanded westwards. In September 1654 Peter the Great's father, Tsar Alexis  captured Smolensk from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. In 1686 Kiev ceased to be part of Poland and came under Russian control. 

However, there were limits to the expansion. Russia was cut off from the Baltic by Sweden’s possession of Livonia (Latvia), Ingria (the area between the Gulf of Finland and Lake Ladoga) and Finland, and her one direct outlet to western Europe was the port of Archangel on the White Sea, which was icebound for six months of the year. In the south the Ottoman Empire and its Tartar vassal state in the Crimea, cut her off from the Black Sea.